Enlarge / Microsoft Teams on different devices. (credit: Microsoft)

Ever since its introduction, Microsoft’s Teams—a collaboration tool for chatting, sharing documents, video, and voice calling—has had one major competitor: Slack. Teams was clearly built as a response to Slack’s growing enterprise presence, with its model of IRC-style chatrooms winning hearts and minds.

Thus far, Microsoft has pushed Teams’ extensive integration with the company’s other products—Office, Skype, SharePoint—as its major distinguishing feature, but Slack has had one important capability that Teams has lacked. The starting price for Slack is free. The free version has all sorts of limitations—only 5GB of files can be saved, only 10,000 lines of chat can be viewed, and integrations with other applications are restricted—but it’s enough to get a sense of how the product works and how it can fit in an organization. The free version also means that Slack has found a role in various non-paying spheres, such as open source development, serving a similar role to the one once served by IRC.

Today, Microsoft is offering a free version of Teams that anyone can sign up to and use. Like the free Slack tier, there are limitations to the free Teams, but Microsoft has picked a very different set of restrictions than Slack’s. There’s no 10,000 message limit—even free users can access and search all their chat history—and the data limits are substantially higher, at 10GB plus 2GB per person. Free Teams supports group voice and video calling, too; Slack’s free tier is restricted to 1:1 video calls. Application integrations are unrestricted, and Microsoft is of course continuing to promote the tie-ins with the online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Enlarge (credit: loonyhiker)

Even if an ISP fails to respond to a customer’s informal complaint, the FCC would not review the complaint until after a consumer pays $225 and goes through the formal complaint process.

While the text of the FCC’s rule about informal complaints was changed, commissioners disagreed on whether this will result in a real change in commission policy. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai argues that the rule change merely codifies the commission’s existing practices. At Pai’s urging, an FCC Enforcement Bureau staff member supported Pai’s contention during today’s meeting.

Enlarge / Strings of photodetectors under the ice at the South Pole light up when neutrinos interact with the ice. (credit: IceCube/NSF)

For most of astronomy’s history, understanding the heavens was limited to what we could see: the narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that constitutes visible light. Only over the last century or so have we expanded beyond that, into the infrared and microwaves and up into the higher energies of X-rays and gamma-rays. The past few years have brought an even more fundamental change: we’ve started detecting astronomical events without photons at all. This was done most famously by LIGO, the hardware that detected gravitational waves. But LIGO was actually late to the game, as the South Pole’s IceCube detector had started listening in on cosmic neutrinos a few years earlier.

But in one critical aspect, LIGO beat IceCube to the punch: it spotted an event where the gravitational wave signal was paired with an optical signal, a burst of gamma rays. This marked the first instance of what’s being termed “multimessenger” astronomy, where a single event is observed using physically distinct signals.

While IceCube has spotted some phenomenally energetic neutrinos, we’ve not been able to match those with a specific photon source. As of today, that has changed with the announcement that an energetic neutrino was likely to have been sent our way by a blazar, a supermassive black hole with a jet pointed in Earth’s direction.